


How'd You Meet?

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [24]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Banter, Drinking, Multi, Semi-Public Sex, Snark, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 04:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14686590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: “Sorry, man,” Steve said to Sam. “We don’t have a meet-cute story.”





	How'd You Meet?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crowgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/gifts).



> Prompt: “how did you two meet?” “they tripped over me. while i standing.”  
> Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator%22).
> 
> Now with a beginning, middle, and ending of sorts. Blame/thank Crowgirl for that.

“Sorry, man,” Steve said to Sam. “We don’t have a meet-cute story.”

“What?” Tony sat up, drunken dignified. Outraged. “The hell we don’t, Rogers! Don’t spread such spurious lies!”

Bucky reached up and patted Tony’s head, eased it back down to the couch, to the relative equanimity of Bucky’s lap. “Watch it, Stark. You’re still seeing double.”

Tony harrumphed but didn’t squirm away; tucked himself closer, even. “No, what I’m seeing, Barnes, is your boyfriend’s inability to tell the fucking truth when it comes to things of significance. Shit that matters.”

“How we met matters?” Steve said. “Me telling a total stranger--no offense, Sam--”

Wilson lifted his shoulders, shouldered his beer. “None taken.”

“--how we did or didn’t meet gets your feathers all in a tizzy?” Steve leaned back. The bar’s threadbare armchair protested. “I don’t get you at all sometimes, Tony. I don’t.”

It was three AM and the bar had been closed for an hour, but one of Tony’s last semi-sober acts had been to bribe the Marriott manager to keep the lights on a little longer, to let them stay crashed out near the fake but very nice fireplace in the back corner with a pitcher of beer and a freshly opened bottle of Johnny Walker Black. Bucky had sweet talked Tony onto the couch, pushed him horizontal and Steve’d gone on goodwill duty: he’d tipped the bartender with a Franklin and thrown an arm around Sam’s shoulders and reassured him that yes, he, a grad student from Temple who’d come up to gush after Tony’s keynote, was indeed welcome to stay.

“You’re not intruding on anything,” he’d said, pointing firmly at a chair in front of the fire. “We’re together all the time. Sick of each other’s voices, practically. Besides, you haven’t finished telling me about your project. Sit, drink. I wanna hear.”

So he’d spilled, gone into the kind of painful detail that even his advisor shrunk from, goaded by Steve’s thoughtful nods and Mr. Stark’s (Tony’s) surprisingly cogent questions and by Barnes’ eyebrows, his expression that never strayed from dubious at best.

But he was talked out now, tired, and he’d tried to toss the conversational ball back into their court by lobbing a softball that ended up smacking a hornets’ nest:  _how’d you all meet_?

Tony was at it again. “What you don’t get, Rogers,” he snapped, “is that something can be important to me and utterly unimportant to you but that doesn’t diminish its relative value to me.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Tony said, “you’re being a dick.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Hence my capacity to perceive dickishness has increased tenfold. You’re right.”

“Babe,” Bucky said, his voice seeping between them like smoke. “Hey.”

They all turned towards him, three pairs of eyes, and his lips lifted, opened to take in the last drops of scotch in his glass. He held the quiet, set the glass down on the edge of the sofa. Tightened his grip on the front of Tony’s shirt.

“You’re scaring the kid. He doesn’t want to see his heroes fight. Do you, Sam?”

Sam blinked. “Um, no, you know. It’s cool. I’m not--”

Bucky held out his hand and quirked an eyebrow at Steve. “Get over here, Stevie, and make nice.”

Sam choked on his beer. Dr. Steven G. Barnes, noted historian, winner of the Whitbread Prize for best monograph, assistant professor at 30, lauded public voice of the humanities--answered to _Stevie_?

“Fuck you,” Steve said, but he got up, follow the magnet of Barnes’ hand, perched on the arm of the couch beside him. “Tony started it.”

Barnes wound an arm around Steve’s waist, grinned up at him, his shadowed face suddenly sunny. “Tony’s smashed and sentimental. Take pity on the old man. He can’t discourse after ten drinks like he used to.”

Steve pitched over and kissed him, his fingers brushing the buttons on Bucky’s henley.

“Not me,” Bucky said after a minute. “Your other boyfriend. Him.”

“Um,” Sam said, “I think Dr. Stark’s asleep.”

“‘M not asleep,” Tony said without bothering to open his eyes. “I’m bored. Whole different animal. And call me an old man again, Barnes, and be prepared to lose a fucking arm.”

“Oh, for--” Steve muttered, and then he was bending, half-toppling over to get his mouth over Tony’s upside down and off center. Bucky caught his belt, held him back from a face plant, and all three of them were giggling now, even Tony, as he reached up and got a hand in Steve’s collar, a twist, and then their kiss got more ridiculous, more serious.

Bucky looked over at Sam, flashed him a grin that was all teeth. “Sorry you have to see this, kid. Sometimes this is the only way I can get them to talk to each other. They’re both good with words on paper; in person, though, not so much.”

“It’s ok, I, uh. I should be going anyway. My panel’s in like”--Sam flashed a look at his watch, felt a shot of panic--”shit, six hours, _shit_ , so I’m gonna--”

“You,” Tony said, emerging from the smother of Steve, “are gonna sit right there, mister, until we answer your question. And by we, I mean Steve, since the true facts are so fucking important to him.”

Steve snorted. “As a general rule,” he said, “yeah, they are.”

Tony shoved at his chest, grumbling, until Steve sat up again. Bucky slid over, folding Tony like an accordion, until Steve got the hint and dropped down, settled at Bucky’s side. Tony’s legs hung off the side of the couch, half on the coffee table, half on the floor. It looked uncomfortable as fuck but he didn’t get up, didn’t cede a centimeter more of space.

Tony said: “I love how you treat our personal history as a singular, knowable thing, Steve. It’s adorable.”

“Not every story,” Steve said patiently, “is _Rashomon_ , honey. Sometimes, there’s just the facts.”

“Ok,” Bucky said, “shut up and let me tell it.”

“Wait--” Tony said.

“Hang on--” Steve said.

“So,” Bucky said, “Steve and me, we’ve known each other since undergrad. We had microeconomics together freshman year. He sat behind me. Until he sat beside me. And then he asked me to form a study group. As in, he needed a tutor but wasn’t sure how to ask.”

Steve sighed. “I thought I wanted to major in poli sci. Oh, god. Three weeks of econ and I knew I was wrong.”

Bucky said: “One night, he comes over to my room to study. Brings his big fuck-off textbook and his laptop and a huge binder of lecture notes and sits down on my bed--”

“Your roommate’s bed was gross! Practically a Superfund site! Where’d you want me to sit? The floor?”

“--and says something very serious about flashcards and honestly, it’s a fucking miracle I still wanted to be in the same room with him at that point, much less kiss the shit out of him.”

“Amen to that,” Tony said.

“Get real,” Steve said, “you love flashcards. If I’d brought flashcards on our first date, you’d have proposed.”

Tony laughed. “If you’d brought flashcards on our first date, Stevie, I’d have fucked you over the table before the first course.”

Steve’s face went brick red. “That was dessert, as I recall.”

“Nope,” Bucky said. “Call it a digestif. You’d dragged him back to our place, remember? Some bullshit about a nightcap. You two assholes woke me up.”

“Hang on,” Sam said, waving his hands, “wait wait wait. How’d we get from Bucky’s dorm room to you all’s first date? You lost me.”

“They lost me a long time ago,” Tony said drily. “Like two hours ago when Stevie started ordering Tom Collins.”

Steve looked affronted. “Hey, I  _like_ a good Tom Collins.”

“Pfffft,” Tony said, “no reason to order that shit at a bar. At least pretend you have good taste when we’re out with our public. Sam’s estimation of you has probably dropped like twenty cool points.”

“Cool points? What, are you ninety years old? It’s not 1998, Stark.”

“Anyway!” Tony said loudly, “I’ll back up. I met Steve at a conference like five years ago. A conference not unlike this one. Except it was in New York, a real city, my city, not this place carved from nice-nice and corn.”

“Iowa City,” Bucky said patiently, reaching for the half-empty bottle of Johnny Black. “We’re in Iowa City, babe.”

“Whatever. I go to this thing at the last minute because it was close and convenient and attending meant that I didn’t have to teach Intro to Fiction for one blessed week. Dumped that shit on Pepper’s desk on my way.”

“His graduate assistant,” Steve said. “Long-suffering. I’m sure you’ll never guess why.”

“It was a spur of the moment thing, so I wasn’t presenting. Didn’t have a damn bit of anything to do but go and listen to smart people talk and then pick fights with them during the Q&A. It was like a fucking mental spa or something. It was great.”

“Until he came to my panel,” Steve said. “Because I didn’t take his bullshit. I fought back.”

“And rightly so,” Tony said, “because I was talking out of my ass about, what was it? Civil War books for boys?”

Steve’s expression was pained. “The construction of masculinity in late nineteenth century fiction written for boys, so no.”

“Yeah, yeah. But see, for 95% of my day up to that point, said ass-talking had been enough to send people scattering.”

Bucky took another swig from the bottle and balanced it carefully on Tony’s chest. “That and the fact that you’re Dr. Tony-fucking-Stark. Don’t forget that part.”

Tony swung a hand in the air, beaming as it drifted up towards the sky. “True. Very true.”

“And that would’ve been the end of it except we ran into each other in the bar later.” Steve chuckled. “A bar not unlike this one.”

“False,” Tony said, “the bar at the Marquis is much classier. For a Marriott, it looks more like the Waldorf than a Holiday Inn. Take note, Iowa City!”

Steve ignored him. “He was drinking tequila and Coke, which, yeah, is even more disgusting than it sounds. I only know this because the second I sat down next to him, he knocked his third one all over my khakis."

Tony rolled his eyes. “He bitched about it and went through half a dozen cloth napkins so of course, I asked him out. By way of apology.”

“That’s true,” Steve said. “Totally how he presented it. ' _Sorry I fucked up your pants; wanna go out on a date_?'”

Bucky laughed. “It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?”

Tony’s face split in a grin and he tipped his face against Bucky’s stomach, the two of them cackling in stereo. Steve shook his head at them, tsked, but his expression was warm and fond and for a moment, Sam could see it clear as day, the web that connected them, the tips and slides of balance that kept the three of them together, upright.

“Fast forward a week,” Steve said, “to Cafe Briand, this gorgeous bistro I could never fucking afford. But I walk in and Tony’s there already, waiting, and somehow, he manages not to spill anything on me and away from an audience, he’s actually charming.”

“And most important,” Bucky said, “when Steve mentioned me, Stark here didn’t bolt.”

Sam squinted. “Huh? When he mentioned you--what?”

“When I mentioned,” Steve said, “that I already had a boyfriend and that he knew I was there and that I figured he’d be ok with me bringing Tony home for a, uh, a look-see.”

Bucky smirked around the bottleneck. “He means, to see if I wanted to do more than just look.”

“...oh,” Sam said. “You, um--?”

“Went on a double date,” Tony said, “and didn’t know it until halfway through. Halfway? Mmm, maybe more like a third. I was late for class the next day.”

“You skipped class the next day,” Steve corrected, “and you tried to get me to email Pep to make an excuse.”

“Yeah, well. You’re better at words than me, baby. Somehow, I knew it even then.”

“Because you’d read a bunch of my articles before our date.”

“Not a bunch,” Tony said, defensive, “only the one that’d just come out in _The Public Historian_. So like 30 pages.”

“Aw,” Bucky said, clutching the Johnny to his heart, “still gets me right here, you doing homework before taking Stevie out. No wonder you’d have fucked him over flashcards.”

“So,” Sam said, bewildered, “you guys go back to your place and Bucky’s there--”

“No shit. I live there.”

“And he was just--cool with it? Everything?”

“No,” Bucky interjected, “no, he was not cool with being woken up at one AM because he has a real job, one that requires his presence from seven to four every goddamn weekday, thank you.”

“Oh,” Sam said, “you’re not in academia?”

Bucky grimaced. "Ah, no. I’ve got a lick of common sense and I prefer to keep my ego intact.”

Steve kissed his temple. “He’s a mental health counselor.”

Tony wound an arm around Bucky’s knee, squeezed. “At a children’s hospital, no less.”

“Jesus,” Sam said. “That’s heavy.”

“Hell of a lot more relaxing than what you guys do,” Bucky said. “It’s like watching a circus, when you guys get together, except all the monkey are wearing bow ties and sweater vests. Or worse, trying to be cool like the old man here with their band t-shirts under blazers.”

Tony swatted Bucky’s hand away and shook free his lapels. “It’s a look,” he said. “A well-recognized pastiche that affords me the illusion of anonymity at these things.”

Steve laughed. “I think being the keynote speaker obliterates your anonymity, Tone. Your picture’s on the front of the conference program.”

“Why are you here, then, Bucky?” Sam asked. “If you don’t have to be?”

Their eyes swung to him, three sets aimed his way. “I’m here,” Bucky said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “for moral support. Plus, if you think these two could survive a long-haul trip alone, well. I got news for you kid.”

“I mean--” Tony shrugged.

“--he’s not wrong,” Steve conceded.

“Anyway,” Bucky said, “so they come into our apartment that night, loud as fuck, and I get up, go out to see what the hell’s going on, and these two are making out next to the fridge, like uncomfortably close to the stove. Tony’s got Steve pressed to the counter and Steve’s moaning like he’s never been touched and it wasn’t the worst thing to wake up to. I’ll give you that.”

Sam’s head felt hot and his brain hurt, like he’d swallowed a train wreck. “Ok--”

“I look up,” Steve said, “and see Buck standing there, half-asleep and mostly naked and it was, I don’t know, it was easier to hold my hand out to him than to say, “Oh hey, remember that guy who yelled at me and messed up my pants? This is him. This is Tony.’”

“And I,” Tony said, “was not capable of speech. Not at any level I’d consider acceptable. Steve’s tongue had rendered me silent.”

Bucky snorted. “Yeah, that’s bullshit. Because I shuffle over to Stevie, still mostly asleep, and take his hand, and this one”--he tapped on Tony’s chest--“this one grins up at me, greedy, and says, ‘Hi, you must be Bucky. Your boyfriend’s a hell of a kisser. Did you teach him everything that he knows? Why don’t we find out?’”

“Smooth as hell,” Steve said, tucking his grin into Bucky’s neck. “By which I mean awkward as fuck.”

Tony sat all the way up, or tried to, but the couch was so small he ended up half-scrunched up in Bucky’s lap. “Look, assholes, we’re here together now, aren’t we? I must’ve done something right that night, no matter how lame it comes off in the telling.”

Bucky smirked down at him. “Yeah, you did something right all right.” He tilted his head and caught Tony’s mouth, lingered. “Several somethings, as I recall.”

“Damn straight,” Tony said, and then they were kissing again, fierce and sloppy, Bucky’s hand worming its way into Tony’s button down, through.

“Kid,” Steve said, his voice scratchier now, his eyes arrows in the firelight, “you should get some shut-eye, don’t you think?”

Sam shot up, hurried. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should.”

Tony murmured something Sam couldn’t hear and Bucky laughed, low and hot. The sound made Sam’s ears burn and Steve’s fingers were easing into Bucky’s hair and Sam double-timed it towards the door, towards the brighter lights of the lobby. “Thanks, Dr. Rogers,” he called. “For, ah, the drinks and everything.”

There was no answer and he didn’t turn back, Sam. He stumbled towards the elevators, patting himself down for his room key, shaking his head at the last few hours spent with a couple of idols and their intimidatingly handsome boyfriend, at the unexpected history lesson of it all.

Sam didn't turn back, didn’t see Steve reach over and haul Tony up and over until he was perched between both their laps, teetering back and forth as they kissed him, tugged at his blazer, divested, and kissed him and each other again.

They were drunk and tired and giggly, oblivious to the world beyond, to everything except the others’ hands, the heat of their bodies, stale with sweat and scotch but sweet to the touch, always. So sweet.

Bucky fussed with Tony’s fly and Steve scratched at his back, long red lines that had Tony arching into Bucky’s fist, a cry high in his throat that he buried in Steve’s shoulder, worked against the grain.

“You keep making noise like that,” Steve murmured, “and Bucky’ll stop. Won’t you, Buck?”

“Fuck no,” Bucky breathed. “Tell me how good it feels, Stark.”

It wasn’t so simple as they’d told Sam, the story of their coming together. But no history, after all, is ever is quite as neat a tale as we’d like to think, much less tell. Their five years together had been messy, a patchwork of trial and error. They’d hurt each other. They’d fought. Two of them had made up, sometimes, while the third simmered, unsatisfied. They’d fucked when they should’ve talked, talked when they should’ve been fucking; read each other’s work too often, not read it thoughtfully or often enough. They’d forged compromises and workarounds and ways of being, of loving, that none of them could’ve imagined on their own. They’d been in love and they’d made a life and it was a tale they were still telling, a common history they were still building. Every story might not be _Rashomon_ but the pleasure of theirs lay in those different layers, the pieces that Steve and Bucky and Tony still spent every day assembling, even in a Marriott bar in Iowa City, Iowa in the middle of a cold conference night.

“Which one of you is carrying me upstairs?” Tony said, after. “My legs are jello. I came so hard I can’t fucking see.”

“Your eyes are just closed,” Steve said. “You should probably open them. That would help with the whole ambulatory thing.”

“I’ll do it,” Bucky said, “but then Steve owes me a blow job.”

“Wait, what? What kind of logic is that, Buck?”

“The _I want you to suck my dick_ kind.”

Tony shushed them and stretched out his arms; wound one around Bucky’s neck, locked the other around Steve’s. “Ok, ok. You drive a hard bargain, sirs.” He kissed one rough cheek, nuzzled the other. “And that’s precisely why I love you both.”

For the record: upstairs, Steve agreed that Bucky’s logic was sound. Bucky returned the favor. Tony chose to remain noncommittal, until such time as he was awake enough to fully appreciate the weight of both arguments.

 

*****

 

At eight AM the next (the same) morning, Sam sat at the front of a small conference room, jammed between a full prof from Auburn and a PhD candidate from Clemson. He was nervous as hell and ok, hungover, but he wasn’t sure if that was from the booze or the company. Maybe both.

He was speaking first. The only blessing. He could shoot himself in the foot now and get it over with, spend the rest of the time wallowing in his failure. Thank god his advisor wasn’t here, was back in Philly, in her office at Temple, attacking undergraduate essays with a red pen. Thank god he was talking at eight o’clock in the morning, when the crowds were smallest and the likelihood of there being anybody he knew in the audience hovered at absolute zero.

The moderator called his name, finished reading his short bio, and Sam took a breath. Adjusted his pages. Looked out for the first time at his audience, all 20 of them staring--hey, good crowd for this early--at him, expectant. _Impress us_ on some faces. _Please fuck up_ on others. And, in the back, oh shit--

Three faces that all said _Hi kid_.

They smiled at him--Steve friendly encouraging, Tony sly, Bucky a firm _you got this_ \--and Sam Wilson thought, _What the fuck. I’m gonna nail this_.

And, reader, he did.

But that’s another story.


End file.
